Break in Case of Emergency (18 page)

The next morning, Jen's eyes opened slowly, with excruciating care, encased as they were in a drying full-body mold of papier-mâché. Charred flat on her back, she was positive that if she didn't move quickly, the adhesive would solidify completely and bury her alive in her bed, but at the same time, if she
did
move quickly, the adhesive would tear her skin from her bones in clumps.

Jen lifted her hands to her face, pressing the pads of her fingers to her cheeks. Some diabolical prosthetics-maker or deranged plastic surgeon had experimented on her in the night, razoring off her flesh and applying some leathery graft in its place. She rolled, grunting, onto her side onto the hot metal of an iron and bolted upright, the flesh of one shoulder searing red. In the bathroom she flipped on the overhead light. What she saw, briefly, was crustaceous, dull red, a blistering exoskeleton. She twisted around to peer at her back and cried aloud, and flipped off the light.

She found a bottle of aloe and a water pitcher, filled the water pitcher with lukewarm water from the tap. She spent the next twenty-four hours sitting on the edge of the enormous canopy bed, naked, watching sitcoms in syndication and
Judge Judy,
eating salted nuts and M&M's from the minibar, drinking from and refilling the pitcher, and rubbing the aloe into all the crustaceous regions. Two angry patches on the backs of her calves. An enraged red line that parted her hair.

When she ran out of aloe, she put on first a pair of cutoffs and then a T-shirt, stifling a screech when the flaming tonnage of the T-shirt fabric slammed into one bright-red shoulder, and pushed and slapped the flaming tonnage back over her head, her mouth mewling through the cotton. She took an elastic-banded short skirt and pulled it up over her hips and under her armpits as an ad-hoc halter top. Her hand on the doorknob, she turned back to fish out her bottle of Animexa from her bag.

“For courage!” she said aloud to herself, breaking off half a tablet and popping it between her chapped lips.

Outside the bungalow, the clouds had diffused and parted company and the sun had traveled closer to the earth in the night and now took up the whole sky. She started to jog to the main house, but the jostling further tenderized her skin. She walked rapidly on her toes instead, until she reached Eva at the front desk. She showed wide-eyed Eva the empty bottle of aloe and asked for more.

“Oh, no, no, you're cooking yourself alive in this,” Eva said. Thirty minutes later, Jen had in her hands a prescription tube of shiny translucent goo and a larger store-bought tube of thick white cream, which she was to alternate applying every two hours.

On Jen's last day in Belize, she tearfully pulled on her swimsuit and a long-sleeved T-shirt that sawed at her ground-beef flesh, popped half an Animexa tablet, took the ferry back to Caye Caulker, and, still teary under her wide straw hat, purchased a spot on a group snorkeling tour of the nearby reef. Manning the boat were two men whose names she didn't catch.

The rest of the group in their snorkel gear kicked and splashed near the surface, peering down on the reef. Jen, her shirt still on and her thick, wet hair splayed protectively over her neck, plunged in as deep as her lungs and cumbersome snorkel mask would allow. The lumpy ocean floor stirred and heaved upward, mutating into a manta ray. Brain coral pulsed. Rainbow formations of fish fanned and feinted. The mask cut and bit into her scorched face like a machete on a picnic table. After a while she tossed her gear into the boat. She filled her lungs and dived down to the shallow ocean floor again, eyes wide open, hugging her knees, watching a turtle float by. She laughed, and watched and listened to her breath turn into bubbles until she ran out of breath.

Jen and Karina waited to put their bags through security at the Belize City airport.

“You poor thing,” Karina said from behind her big-fly sunglasses as she combed her fingers through her ponytail. “You look like you need a vacation from your vacation.”

“Yeah,” Jen said. It hurt to smile. “It was so overcast and rainy the whole day I was out with Baz Angler—so
dark
—I just completely forgot to put sunscreen on.”

“Out an entire day in the Caribbean and no sunblock,” Karina said, shaking her head. “Jen, what are we going to
do
with you?”

“I know, I know,” Jen said, nodding, her usual cushion-laugh squeaking out as a pained
heh.
“Heavy cloud cover is no substitute for UV protection. I learned the hard way. But as you probably know, Baz is really into
reality,
and I sure did get a dose of reality.”

Karina continued to shake her head, and Jen continued to nod.

“So,” Jen said, “is Travis on our flight?”

“You know, I didn't want to say, but that brother didn't just leave the U.S. of A.—he might have left planet earth,” Karina said, tapping her sunglasses and raising her eyebrows.

Jen's rolling suitcase clattered onto its side, and as she leaned over, grimacing, to pull it upright, her tote bag slipped to the floor, too, tossing lip gloss and car keys onto the linoleum and setting Jen's shoulder alight again. An eidetic image, unbidden and undeniable, burned into Jen's mind—a gauzy silhouette of Karina atop Travis in an enormous canopy bed, her back arched, her hands scraping compulsively at her tossing hair, Travis beneath her wearing nothing but a polo shirt, counting down a multitasking round of tricep lifts on the colorful bedspread as Karina writhed above.

“I see,” Jen said, gripping the handle of her suitcase harder.

“A few irons missing in his golf bag, know what I mean?” Karina said, tongue nestled between her teeth.

Jen's mouth was hanging open. “Wait, who are we talking about?”

Karina's expression behind her big-fly sunglasses was inscrutable. “Your new BFF and our likely new board member,” she said. “Baz. He's
nuts.
Am I right?”

“Oh, yeah, well,” Jen said, looking down at the floor. “The thing is, Karina, if that was the case—if we knew Baz was a handful—it would have been good for me to know that about him ahead of time.” Jen was talking to the floor. Her synapses ejaculated three more pumps of Karina's hips atop Travis
ungh ungh ungh
before she could blink them away. “Good for LIFt, I mean,” Jen continued. “Just in terms of being able to plan ahead, to strategize—I just—I wish I'd known more ahead of time. That's all. No harm done, of course.” She feared that she was coming across as pouty, bratty, so she wrested her features into an amiable alignment and looked up at Karina.

Twinges of pleasure played at Karina's lips. This was who she was, Jen remembered, not for the first time. When Karina had information to disclose that could be helpful, she wouldn't disclose, and yet when it might have conferred favor on Karina to withhold information—to appear ignorant and therefore innocent—she freely disclosed, because the clear and present benefits of demonstrable informational superiority were more palpable, more valuable to her, than the less immediately tangible benefits of trust or goodwill she might have salvaged by withholding. This was something Karina had in common with Baz Angler, Jen thought. An iron missing in their respective golf bags.

“I just don't understand how a disagreement about whether or not Congress votes to extend unemployment benefits somehow turns into people threatening to leave before the pumpkin pie is even served,” Jen was saying to her mother on the phone.

Jen had in truth been happy for her brothers' argument to erupt over her parents' Thanksgiving dinner table, as the yelling and gesticulating and slamming of fists on table had drowned out her sisters-in-law's tag-team queries about when they could expect Jen and Jim to “start a family” (in Sharon's straightforward terms) and/or “get going already!” (Betsy's more insouciant wording).

“Well, I admire your brothers' passion,” Jen's mom said. “They feel strongly about things, and that's what they have in common, never mind politics. Their passion is their common ground.”

“It's ridiculous, childish behavior,” Jen said.

“What are your plans for Christmas?” Jen's mom asked.

“I still need to book the tickets,” Jen said.

“Okay, well,” Jen's mom said, sighing heavily, “you know, I
hate
to bring this up, and before I do, I need you to know that I
certainly
don't care about this, and your
father
certainly doesn't care—I mean, he doesn't care all that much—but I would be terribly remiss if I didn't say
something,
so—”

“What? What is it?” Jen asked.

“It has been noted,” Jen's mom said, her staccato inflection introducing a contractual formality to her speech, “that you did not spend the assigned family budget on gifts last Christmas.”

“What? Noted by who?”

“That is unimportant to the moral of the story, and—”

“What is the moral of the story?” Jen asked.

“—and it is of course
completely
up to you what you spend, but I
would
ask the two of you to try to keep the family budget in mind.”

“I thought we were supposed to spend one hundred fifty dollars per person,” Jen said.

“Right, so you and Jim should be spending three hundred dollars
per recipient,
because there are
two
of you,” Jen's mom replied. “God, I hate this. It's only to keep it fair, please understand that.”

Jen laughed. “I don't even have three hundred dollars to spend on
anyone,
and I'm supposed to figure out how to spend three hundred dollars on
Dad
?” she asked. “All he ever wants is a power tool or a biography of a president.”

“Look, I know it's not a perfect system,” Jen's mom said. Jen could already hear her fading out, her mother's slender fingers slowly turning the volume dial on this particular conversation from low to off, her eyes sliding away toward the closest table in need of retidying or the closest glowing television screen. “This is
truly
the best way your father knows to keep it equitable. Okay, hon? I'll let ya go now.”

Jim and Millie were sweeping the perimeter of Meg and Marc's loft playing Magic Carpet Ride while Jen and Meg sat at the glass-and-oak dining table, shelling pistachios. Magic Carpet Ride involved placing Millie atop any soft, smooth-bottomed object—a rag rug, a bathroom mat, Buzz the golden retriever's dog basket—and Jim pulling Millie and the smooth-bottomed object as far and rapidly as possible until the smooth-bottomed object had wrested itself free of Millie or Millie had collapsed over on her side squeeing with laughter, whichever came first.

Magic Carpet Ride also had a vocal component.

“Magic carpet ride! Magic carpet ride!” Jim called out.

“Magi cop rye! Magi cop rye!” Millie called out.

Meg was asking Jen about her Thanksgiving. Meg had spent Thanksgiving at the home of her maternal aunt, who was a countess by marriage, or maybe a baroness, and who, in a move inexplicable to the rest of her exceedingly discreet family, had just assented to a glossy magazine feature about the top floor of her town house, which consisted entirely of a bathroom carved out of gold Calacatta marble imported from Italy. “We have the equivalent of a Roman aqueduct flowing beneath the floors—no more cold feet after a warm bath,” Meg's aunt had explained to the magazine writer.

“It was stupid,” Jen said. “Thanksgiving was stupid. It wasn't as stupid as the trip to Belize.”

“You look fine, by the way,” Meg said now. “You look beautiful. A bit pink, but healthy pink. I thought you would look like something I forgot on the stove.”

“You can't see my back, though—it's covered in cobwebs, only the cobwebs are
sautéed flesh,
” Jen said.

Millie ran hollering past with Buzz's dog basket over her head, with Jim crab-walking a few paces behind her.

“So far as I can tell,” Jen continued, “Leora wanted someone to go to Belize to talk with Baz Angler about joining her board, and Karina espied an opportunity to finagle a romantic Caribbean getaway with the Indiana Jones of nutrition bars, so long as she could loop me in to handle the actual work. But that's just an educated guess. Is this what people do?”

At the periphery of Jen's vision, Millie flew through the air hooting and
floomph
ed onto the sofa, Magic Carpet Ride having readily segued into the Hammock Game.

“No,” Meg said. “This is not what people do.”

Jen chomped a pistachio. “At least the fact that they sent me does bespeak a confidence in my abilities.”

Floomph

“Do you actually want Leora Infinitas's confidence in your abilities?” Meg asked. “Is that an ambition of yours?”

“I have never even made eye contact with Leora Infinitas,” Jen said. “I don't think she knows my name or what I do. I'm not even entirely sure she knows I went on this ridiculous trip or that she paid for it.”

Floomph

Jen snapped another pistachio. “You know,” she said, “speaking of meeting people, I never met a single Belizean there who wasn't serving me in some way. Handing me a drink. Taking my bags. Boating my boat to nowhere. I never had a single conversation with someone with whom my organization was nominally connecting.”

Floomph

Meg shrugged. “But that was up to you,” she said, not unkindly. “What was stopping you?”

“You're right,” Jen said, as a screeching Millie skidded into her lap and climbed atop her. “Nothing was stopping me,” she said, hugging the little girl to her chest and looking up at Jim, who was panting with Buzz's red bandanna kerchief clenched between his teeth.